Acer Iconia Tab A500_2_3.

Build and ErgonomicsThe Acer Iconia Tab A500 is available in a grayish silver lightly brush metal finish body with no sharp edges. The rear covering peeps out from the top and lower portion about the front side. The display is 10. 1-inch wide diagonally and it has a resolution of 1280x800 pixels. It's an LED backlit LCD screen having a glossy finish. The rounded edges allows the tablet to become held comfortably in an individual's palms, but we would have liked a little more grip. The power button is located on the top left hand edge and it is easy to reach and has now the 3. 5 mm audio jack just above it along with the mini HDMI port about the lower edge. The volume controller is located on the top edge beside your orientation lock button with a nice click mechanism. On the right hand edge there's a power port at the top part, a mini-USB port and USB port about the lower edge. The 5 MP camera section is located on the on the top right hand edge of the rear side and sports a particular LED flash whereas the bezel about the left hand side houses front side facing 2MP camera. Two speakers are located on the lower half and you will observe your fingers covering them when you hold the tablet while in the landscape mode. We really liked the situation it comes along along with, which can bend to form a stand against which you can place your A500 and enjoy a movie. FeaturesAcer Iconia Tab A500 runs the Android 3. 0 operating system popularly referred to as Honeycomb. Google has built the Honeycomb user interface from the ground up and resembles nothing like its smartphone cousins. The actual display is divided into five home screens. The primary home page has three buttons about the lower left hand corner for going back, coming to the home screen and checking out the apps which have been opened at a time period. It houses the NVIDIA Tegra 2 system on chip having a snappy 1 GHz twin core processor. Navigating through the residential screens is breezy and you'll notice the outlines of frame disappearing as you settle onto one tv screen, a nice touch. Long holding a particular home screen provides you with a zoomed out view from the five home screens with options to add more widgets, applications, wallpapers, etc to the screens using a simple drag and decrease mechanism. You can see the last five opened applications by simply tapping on the control key beside Home. Getting into the Settings menu from the task bar requires three clicks unless you are searching for common tasks such as configuring WiFi, turning Notifications on/off, altering brightness and activating Airplane mode. This may appear to be a round about way of doing things. The Settings menu is very exhaustive with an extra option called Dolby Cell phone. The on board Youtube widget has a stack of videos arranged in some sort of domino setup. Gmail application syncs with no issues and has a new left and right hand panel arrangement with the settings options arranged on the upper right hand place. The bundled browser is very good with the tab functionality which enables you to have around 16 tabs open at any given time. You can scroll through the tabs which is a smart rather than simply clicking the Next Tab option to get at tab number 15. You will observe apps placed in a drawer section on the homepage, which houses associated applications. There's Multimedia, Interpersonal, eReading and GameZone that are the broad categories and you'll have related applications for example audio / video person apps under Multimedia, Lumiread and the Browser under eReading and so forth. With the help of a round button housing your plus sign, you can add extra applications according to each section. This functionality is somewhat like the Folder function in a iOS, except that within the Honeycomb OS, you do not are able to name the folder. Visually though it looks much better than the Folder implementation about the iOS, but then again, it just adds more clicks needed to get involved with a particular application. PerformanceScreen: The Iconia A500 comes with an LCD screen which was an enormous letdown. The picture quality is good and contains good brightness levels, however the colour accuracy is debatable as we found a heavy bluish cast on the screen. When placed beside an iPad 2 we could clearly see the main difference. We tried adjusting the brightness to obtain a good contrast but your bluish cast ruins items. In one of the videos, a hot pink coloured wall was rendered as violet about the A500. The onscreen keypad is excellent to type on in both the landscape and portrait method. In the landscape mode, you will not have the ability to type comfortably with ones thumb, so you will end up using one hand to hold the tablet and other to type. Holding the tablet within the portrait mode allows convenient typing, but your as the keypad is located in the bottom, balancing the tablet while speedy typing is definitely an issue. We did not have any issues with typing setbacks though. Multimedia Applications: Acer Iconia A500 offers some native multimedia applications for example NemoPlayer - organizes a person's photos, music and videos and plays them back when selected. Photo Browser 3D enables you to see your albums by using gestures to toggle involving photographs, we found the actual implementation very laggy. MusicA is an application that claims to listen to an audio track and provide you with the details of the rails being played. We attempted it with popular music artists like Eminem, Pink Floyd, Evanescence as well as Porcupine Tree, but its GraceNote server could not develop any results. So overall, the native multimedia apps, even though they look great, fail to impress. YouTube was probably the only real app which worked with no hitch. The Social Jogger application has a tendency to collate your Twitter and Facebook timeline and provide you updates, but for some reason we were getting updates which were 5 hours older despite having an auto refresh time of 15 minutes, which was just strange. LumiRead is a native ebook reader application and is like any other ebook reader app out there, with options to segregate the books based on genres. It also has one touch use of bookstores, although at present the countries to select from were just Germany along with China. Camera and Movie: The on board 5 MP camera is very OK for casual capturing in outdoor conditions. Pictures taken indoors were noisy. Video shooting is terrible with jerky videos and there isn't any option to zoom with or out while dwell shooting. However we liked the actual implementation of camera functionalities within the rotary dial sort of the way. Tapping an icon opens up a variety of options to choose from so that you do not have to get away from the camera mode to finalise your current settings. Sound quality is quite decent thanks to the Dolby Mobile setting option which enables you to adjust Treble and Bass sound and select from a variety of equalizer settings. We just found the volume to be very reduced, and with the Dolby Popular music disabled, you will really have to strain your ears to hear the audio. Even though the fingers tend to insure the speakers, the sound output isn't affected. Do not expect great audio though. We found the bass lacking the punch plus low frequency sounds went for any toss. Video playback was an issue area because we couldn't play most of this test videos despite converting the theifs to the formats supported through the Iconia Tab. We needed to rely on YouTube's full HD videos for this test. The video high quality was good, but all of us did notice some music and banding in scenarios with solid colours. The reflective screen can be annoying for those who have light sources in the background. The A500 has the mini HDMI port which enables you to connect the tablet for an LCD TV via any HDMI cable. ValueThe cost of Rs. 27, 990 is lower than the iPad couple of (16GB). It is a affordable product for the features and performance to choose from. Not a great supplement for shooting photos as well as videos, but it includes a decent enough battery existence to last you for two days of moderate application which we liked. VerdictThe Acer Tablet includes a good underlying software in conjunction with decent hardware. But we think the display could be improved. If not an IPS panel, the least Acer can do is get rid of the blue cast. The connectivity options give it a slight edge over the apple company ipad, and also the user interface of the Honeycomb OS and also its particular response is great. Nevertheless, the OS needs a learning curve and it is not as intuitive as the iOS. As far as Android tablets go, this is actually the best on the market right now thanks to its double core processor and Honeycomb OPERATING SYSTEM. Pros: Great feature arranged, connectivity optionsGood, capable UICons: Steep learning curve from the UIBluish cast on typically the screen